Visual Art by Jacob Mann

Photopaintings

Warning - artistic nudity

After studying still life painting for years I've become fascinated with process of designing still life.

 Here is photo taken from a still life set. The light is flat, lots of details but no focal point.

This is a photo of oil painting I've painted while studying in the art students league of New York. The lighting is different, combination of dark and light creates drama which is more interesting visually than the photo.

It got me thinking - as artist I can change lighting as I see fit and create drama (make picture) while as photographer I can only photograph what I see (take picture).

Hold on - is it really so? Don't we have Photoshop? I've loaded the first photograph into Photoshop and after a while I've got this image.

This is a photo that looks like painting - not because I've faked brush-stokes as some software does, but because I've implemented painterly visual concept, created drama between dark and light in a photograph.

And now I can print it on canvas and paint on top of it making some artistic changes.

On the left is the finished product - the  vase and some fruits are painted over.

So what is it? You can call it  giclee, but usually giclee is a print of a photograph of a painting.

This is not a photo of art but art itself, I call it "Photopainting".

Bellow are some of my photos that can be used to make photopaintings .

Also below you can see my experiments with portraits.

please click thumbnail to see larger image